Nordic Heritage Museum Nordic American Voices Interview of Svan
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Nordic Heritage Museum Nordic American Voices Interview of Svan Kalve On February 18, 2012 At Seattle, Washington Interviewed by Saundra Martin and Lise Orville Sandra Martin : [0:01] This is an interview for the Nordic American Voices oral history project. Today is February 18, 2012 and I'll be interviewing Sven Kalve, we are at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle, Washington. [0:16] My name is Sandra Magnusson Martin, and my co-interviewer is Lisa Orvill. So Sven, I understand that you were born in Norway, but came to the United States very young. Do you have any memories of living in Norway? Sven Kalve : [0:33] Yes. I do. I was a teenager when I came, so I have lots of memories. I was born in 1938, in January, so it was two and a half years, or a little less than that, before the German occupation of Norway. I don't have any memory of that occurring, but my memories start during that occupation time. Sandra : [1:01] Do you recall stories that your parents might have told of what it was like during the occupation? Sven : [1:09] Yes. I am aware of stories, and I have recollection of some of them during the occupation. I'm from an island on the west coast not far from Bergen. South of Bergen [inaudible 00:01:22] . We were the only family on the island and there were lots of other similarly small but populated islands in the area. Most people there were fishing. [1:36] So when the occupation occurred there were a lot of young men and some young women who would like to join the Norwegian Forces in Exile, who by then had been moved to Britain. The fishermen in that part of the country, many of them left small, fishing vessels provisioned and available for those people who wanted to leave, to take them and go to Shetland. [2:16] Shetland was 300 miles to the west. It was part of Scotland, and it's where a lot of people from the west coast of Norway who wanted to join the forces in exile left for. I think you had interviews with some who did that. [2:33] I had a brother who left. He was a machinist, he was a teenager, but he left as a machinist on one of those boats with several others. There were both young men who would like to leave, and there were people who had to leave because they were being sought by the occupying forces and they wanted to get away. They'd meet those people, the underground would send the messages to them. My father was part of that. [3:09] I had cousins who left through those fishing boats. An uncle who left. An aunt who tried to leave, but she died on her way to meeting the boat in a bicycle accident. That was early in the war, of course. Nordic American Voices Page 1 of 17 [3:31] My memories probably start about two years into the war when the occupying forces occasionally visited our island. We had a farm. They kept track of what was going on on the farms, if we've produced anything for market that they were interested in. That was part of the control process that they had. We didn't produce anything for the market. It was a farm for our... Sandra: [4:09] Self-sustaining. Sven : [4:10] Yes, for our use. It provided us with a good supply of food, of course, during the occupation, which some of the people in the urban areas did not...I remember late in the war, a group of soldiers came to interview my father because they had learned that he had been part of the underground. I don't know what they were seeking, but they came, but this was late in the war. [4:48] Probably they were not as enthusiastic about their work then as some of the earlier ones had been. After some period of interview, they left, and we were all intact. Sandra : [5:01] What are your parents’ names? Sven : [5:04] My father's name was Olaf Kalve. My mother was Sophia. She was from another island in [inaudible 00:05:15] , which was her maiden name. We had a big family. There were eight siblings. Both my parents were from large families, so when I go back I have lots of people to visit. Lots of cousins, second cousins now, and my last sibling passed away last Fall, but I did visit her for her 90th birthday in March last year. [5:55] She was still alive for the 90th. She carried on the celebration in her home. Several days of celebrating. Her husband, who is 95, is still living in her home. She exhibited here at the Nordica Museum some years ago. Leather works that she... Sandra : [6:17] What is her name? Sven : [6:18] Olo Kalve Stucksen. Lisa Orvill : [6:23] Can you describe her artwork? Sven : [6:29] She's been artistic in many things. This particular thing that she exhibited here was what in Norwegian is called [foreign words] , gilded leather. It's treated leather, especially for this process. They score designs in it, so she'll sketch a design on it, or just do it from her memory. Then they cover it with a gold leaf, gold sheet, and paint on that. [7:14] It was a medieval treatment of furniture upholstery, which is what mostly she was making. But, I've also seen it in old, big homes in Europe as wall covering to cover the stone sides. That was being revived. She was part of the activity, in Norway anyway, to revive it. She was honored by a royal medal for her work in that, which was exciting for us all. Sandra : [7:51] Very exciting. Did she come to Seattle to visit? Sven : [7:54] She came to Seattle to visit several times, and her husband came a few times, when my father was alive, particularly. Sandra : [8:07] After? Excuse me, go ahead. [8:12] Since I touched on my father being here, we came here together in 1953. My father, who was a widower at that time, a brother who was a year younger than me, I was 15 years, 14, ordinarily, 14. We had left the island because of a series of tragedies. This was after the war. We had lost our mother in a long, serious illness. Then we had Nordic American Voices Page 2 of 17 lost a brother and a younger sister in a boating accident, along with our housekeeper and one of the employees. [8:53] My father just couldn't survive on the island anymore. He couldn't be there. I mentioned we were the only family on the island. We had a boat yard by that time. Earlier he had been a fisherman. We had a boat yard, and he was dependent on people there to work. He was dependent on people to help us keep the house up to...My brother and I wasn't as good at that. [laughter] [9:24] About the time he was thinking about that, one of my mother's uncles, who had immigrated to United States as a teenager early in the century, came for his first visit to Norway and visited us, and said, "If you come to Seattle, you'll have a job the next day." So, this became our destination. We sold the island, applied for visa, and lived in Bergen for the year that we were awaiting our visa. Bergen was the largest major city to us. We left Norway in January, 1953 on [inaudible 00: [9:54] 10:23] . Landed in New York eight days later. I would remember being on the deck when we passed the Statue of Liberty. [10:38] I don't remember any specific emotions around it, but it was fascinating to see the huge harbor that we were coming into. I remember that. We took a train to Chicago, and Great Northern Train from Chicago to Seattle. Our uncle met us here, met us at the train station. Took the bus to his home on Capitol Hill. That's where we lived. He and his wife had a boarding house, essentially. Some of his children, a daughter and a son, lived there, as did others, and we lived there for a few months. Sandra : [11:25] By 1953, what was the procedure to immigrate? Did you have to go through something in New York when you arrived? Sven : [11:37] No, at that time, there was a visa process firmly in place, and the immigration people boarded the ship before we docked. They were on the ship for the last few miles of the voyage, so they came on out there, out in New York Harbor, and cleared...may have taken a little longer than that, but we were cleared. Once we left the ship, we were on our own to find our destinations. Sandra : [12:24] So did you go to school here, or did you and your brother start working also? Sven : [12:30] We went to school here. As I had mentioned, my father did start work at Oxguard Shipyard here in Ballard the day or two after we arrived. I would have been probably the age of a ninth-grader, and my brother, eighth-grader. [12:52] They took me to Garfield High School because that was the school district we lived in, the school service area that we lived in then.